rcu: Narrow early boot window of illegal synchronous grace periods

The current preemptible RCU implementation goes through three phases during bootup. In the first phase, there is only one CPU that is running with preemption disabled, so that a no-op is a synchronous grace period. In the second mid-boot phase, the scheduler is running, but RCU has not yet gotten its kthreads spawned (and, for expedited grace periods, workqueues are not yet running. During this time, any attempt to do a synchronous grace period will hang the system (or complain bitterly, depending). In the third and final phase, RCU is fully operational and everything works normally. This has been OK for some time, but there has recently been some synchronous grace periods showing up during the second mid-boot phase. This code worked "by accident" for awhile, but started failing as soon as expedited RCU grace periods switched over to workqueues in commit 8b355e3bc140 ("rcu: Drive expedited grace periods from workqueue"). Note that the code was buggy even before this commit, as it was subject to failure on real-time systems that forced all expedited grace periods to run as normal grace periods (for example, using the rcu_normal ksysfs parameter). The callchain from the failure case is as follows: early_amd_iommu_init() |-> acpi_put_table(ivrs_base); |-> acpi_tb_put_table(table_desc); |-> acpi_tb_invalidate_table(table_desc); |-> acpi_tb_release_table(...) |-> acpi_os_unmap_memory |-> acpi_os_unmap_iomem |-> acpi_os_map_cleanup |-> synchronize_rcu_expedited The kernel showing this callchain was built with CONFIG_PREEMPT_RCU=y, which caused the code to try using workqueues before they were initialized, which did not go well. This commit therefore reworks RCU to permit synchronous grace periods to proceed during this mid-boot phase. This commit is therefore a fix to a regression introduced in v4.9, and is therefore being put forward post-merge-window in v4.10. This commit sets a flag from the existing rcu_scheduler_starting() function which causes all synchronous grace periods to take the expedited path. The expedited path now checks this flag, using the requesting task to drive the expedited grace period forward during the mid-boot phase. Finally, this flag is updated by a core_initcall() function named rcu_exp_runtime_mode(), which causes the runtime codepaths to be used. Note that this arrangement assumes that tasks are not sent POSIX signals (or anything similar) from the time that the first task is spawned through core_initcall() time.

PEPaul E. McKenney committed 9 years ago